December 11, 2013

Garrett says no question Cowboys have had too many hamstring injuries

Jason Garrett said the Cowboys have had too many hamstring injuries and they will study them to see how they happen and what can prevent them.

“We have to look at how we’re practicing and some of the things we’re doing in our strength and conditioning program,” Garrett said Wednesday. “We always try to evaluate that. We try to do good analysis of that along the way. We’ve had too many of them, there’s no question about that. They happen all around the league – I get that. But we have to keep doing our part and our evaluation to how we can eliminate them the best we can.”

Morris Claiborne, Dwayne Harris and Bruce Carter missed practice Wednesday because of hamstring injuries. Sean Lee, Miles Austin and Justin Durant have also missed time this year because of hamstrings. The Cowboys have had 10 different players with hamstring injuries.

Garrett said the Cowboys’ evaluations do not show one reason.

“Sometimes it has to do with the workload and how much running we’re doing,” he said. “You do look at how we’re warming up on all those days. Some of it is on the player to make sure they continue to warm up and stay fresh over the course of a game, depending on what the circumstances are. I don’t know if there’s anything you can pinpoint and say this is the reason. If there was, we would’ve addressed it and had it cleaned up a long time ago.”

Asked if the Cowboys suffer more or fewer hamstrings than other teams in the league, Garrett said, “We’ve done injury analysis before, and sometimes it’s difficult to pinpoint based on the statistics you get. Whether it’s missed practice time or game time, we’ve tried to do it to the best of our ability with every injury and see if there’s any sort of trend that we can do a better job of. I think it’s relatively consistent around the league.”